MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

I'm so confused about the comments here.

There are a bunch of people who can't reproduce the slowness at all, but nearly all downvoted or you have to wade through 100's of comments to get to them.

The majority of comments are just dumping on Macs, nothing whatsoever to do with the content of the article, and seem to be blindly assuming it's true.

And I can't seem to find any substantive discussion of whether this is actually real or not, or just some weird bug on the author's machine.

I don't see any evidence that Catalina is "slow by design", just a single anecdote from the author. I was definitely hoping for some more substantive critique/discussion...

> There are a bunch of people who can't reproduce the slowness at all, but nearly all downvoted or you have to wade through 100's of comments to get to them.

It's possible that they have certain security features disabled.

> The majority of comments are just dumping on Macs, nothing whatsoever to do with the content of the article, and seem to be blindly assuming it's true.

Welcome to Hacker News…this is common on any discussion on any topic, especially one that many people can understand in some way.

Did you run the test yourself? Why do you assume people are blindly assuming it's true? For me first run was 0.5s, second run was 0.004s, so there's definitely something going on.

Op linked validated bug reports.. One of which Apple responded with "by design" of which op derived the title.

The down votes are because it seems pretty clear that the people who don't experience have long lived instances of their os and likely have grandfathered or disabled security settings. There are a lot of people saying ita pretty easy to replicate with a new os.

And it is, I just did it. Did you?

I've noticed the negativity on macOS. There may be reasons for it, I don't know. I'm pretty happy with it and I've started skipping some discussions because of the amount of comments that lack any curiosity, or worthy discussion.

It's not just macOS. What you really want is a topic that most commenters have no background knowledge or preconceptions about, and you have to make sure that you can't link to one in any way whatsoever. The latter is a little hard to do, because people will cling to the most tenuous of relationships in order to be able to provide their input: you could be talking about a Windows API and someone will bring up EEE through some convoluted path and from there the conversation will go downhill. The best comments are the ones on articles about dolphin psychology or whatever and someone might ask a simple question and a real expert will chime in with something like "I have worked with dolphins for 17 years and also I wrote my doctoral thesis in cetacean-human interactions" and it's just a page of an interesting viewpoint that you just never knew about.

I did. It got downvoted with no replies. I don't have any security settings changed or anything. First and second run were both around 0.005s.

That's why I wrote this new comment, in the hopes that maybe it would be seen.

No they didn't, there's no link. They said it's "FB7674490" but Googling that reveals nothing, so I can't read it.

I don't know what the bug report said, or what specifically was by design. Surely "the entire machine freeze for 1-2 seconds every 10th minute, not to mention everything just being sluggish" is not by design.

And I was unable to replicate it (I was one of the comments that got downvoted), although I don't have the luxury of trying a fresh OS. I haven't disabled any security settings, and I don't know what would have been grandfathered -- that's not mentioned anywhere in the article as a factor.

So that's what's bothering me -- the assumption that contradictory evidence isn't valid while the original post somehow is, and no discussion around that, or what tradeoffs there might be.

Now, finally, there are actually some substantive comments from people testing it. There wasn't before though, and it's still unclear as to whether this really is bad design, a wise tradeoff, or if the author's machine has something else going on. Because their experience of a frustratingly slow Mac is just not the norm at all.

Weird. I just noticed that the difference was only the very first time I ran that test. After that the second one was only 100% faster than the first one. That could easily be explained by filesystem / caching things.